The 'Red Dragon/Red Flag' Debate Revisited: the Labour Party, Culture and Language in Wales, 1945-c. 1970

The inner- party quarrels and disagreements over devolution have begun to cast a dark shadow over the history of the Labour Party in Wales after 1945. By focusing on this single issue, it is easy to form the impression that, in Wales, Labour was a party engaged in civil war for much of the period from 1945 through to 1979. Rather than seeing the divisions over devolution as an intellectual debate on the relative merits of centralization or decentralization, or as a debate over the most effective means of curing Welsh economic ills, those divisions are believed to expose deeper- rooted differences within the party: after 1945, it is suggested, Welsh Labour was divided across social, cultural, geographic and, especially, linguistic lines. In the cauldron of post- war south Wales Labour politics, it was sometimes difficult to avoid the tendency of equating the Welsh language with nationalist political affiliations and sympathies.